Then Came The River

By Debapriya Datta

In the verdant tea plantations of Assam, Roop Sharma, the daughter of an impoverished tea planter, tries to take her life, but is saved by the river that flows past her town. Then an unexpected friendship blooms between her and Miss Vikranta Barua, the scion of a wealthy tea plantation family, who arrives as a temporary teacher at her convent school. Their intimacy grows and they find happiness as together they battle life's blows,
including the insurgency that casts its shadows over the entire state. But their friendship is tested when Vikranta sides with her paramour, who is implicated in harming Roop's family. Set against the backdrop of the militant secessionism in Assam, Then Came the River is about friendship and intimacy, the thin line between love and friendship, and the agony of loving and losing a friend.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Aug 18, 2022
• ISBN: 9789354351457

Book preview

Prologue

The rain came in torrents that night. It came in bursts of fury, in flashes of blazing silver splinters, in blasts of molten rime, and impaled the night. The gale whipped the darkness and swept it helter-skelter; the incendiary sky spat out long serpents of lightning and thundered with rage. It was a storm that jolted you awake from sleep and brought forth a feeling of unease in its wake.

Though terrified of thunderstorms as a child, they no longer bothered me. I lay in bed and listened to the din of the thunder and the rain and remembered something direful that sleep had transiently erased from my consciousness. I worried about a small aeroplane that had taken off from the aerodrome at Dibrugarh, some twenty miles from here, a few hours back. It was headed west, and it was bearing away the one person in this universe who meant the world to me. Actually, the only person in the world that I would live for and die for… I loved her with all the fervour and simplicity that my naive sixteen-year-old self could muster… But she was gone, lost to me forever. All I could do now was pray, and try not to weep, my mind tremulous and turbulent like the viscid, moist air outside. The storm was the after-effect of a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal and its course was likely to intersect hers. I prayed fervently that the aeroplane would not fall in the path of the malevolent storm, that she would reach her destination safely.

Each minute, she was drifting further and further away … but that drifting away had started long before she boarded that plane. Despair engulfed me in the darkness; I felt as if I was the only soul in this desolate, rain-drenched universe. The respite from my loneliness had been so brief. I was back in the isolated, gelid world, without friends and family, which I used to inhabit before she came into my life.

She was gone from my life, my world; she was travelling to a different world. She had left the green valley of tea that was our home, Boora Pahar that was our mountain, and the Brahmaputra that was our river, the river that was our ally. She was going to a new country, where she would embrace a new valley, a new mountain, and perhaps a new river, as her own. She was taking with her the brightness and levity she had brought to my life. Once again, life was going to be bleak, and grey, like the morning that waited to dawn.

I rarely cried; I usually couldn’t cry; crying did not come easily to me but that night I cried a deluge of tears … I cried for the loss of all I held dear. The one person I had ever loved; the only person, who had truly cared about me, in my sixteen years of living, was gone.

The next morning, my friend Simran called me with details about Miss Vikranta Barua’s departure. Simran’s sister, Meena, who was a close friend of Miss Vikranta, had seen her off at the airport the previous evening. Miss Vikranta had left with her lover, James Irwin, the British tea magnate, in a chartered aeroplane.

Most people have ties linking them to others... Perhaps not strong bonds of kinship, but at least tenuous threads of association that come from living in society and carrying out the mundane tasks of daily life that the business of living entails. There were people, like my father, who in their quest for spiritual enlightenment abandoned society, took to seclusion, and ventured to isolated places in pursuit of nirvana. But this they did out of choice. Then there were people living in the thick of society, amidst a cluster of humans, embedded in its impenetrable matrix, imprisoned in its vicious talons, who were excluded from belonging and lived alone, in exile from humanity; in chilling, freezing isolation; in opaque, impenetrable cocoons.

They are the lonely and I was one of them … until Miss Vikranta came into my life and made it otherwise.

My name is Roopam Sharma; I was called Roop for brevity. My name purportedly meant beauty in Sanskrit but there was nothing beautiful about me or my life back then. The story of my life really started when Miss Vikranta Barua came into it. Had I not known her, had she not come into my life as my class teacher at the Holy Cross Auxilium School for Girls in Icherita, my innumerable inner demons may have devoured me, and I may not have lived to tell this tale.

PART I

One

Two years back, when I first met Miss Vikranta, I was a foolish fourteen-year-old, on the verge of turning fifteen but still at the threshold of leaving my girlhood firmly behind me and stepping into adolescence. I lived in a tea plantation near Icherita, in Upper Assam. Icherita one may not have heard of, but surely everyone knew of Assam, the land of tea; the tea bowl of the world so to speak. It was a land so green that the seasons did not sully it and it remained lush from the monsoons that liked to linger and seemed loathe to leave every year. The mighty river Brahmaputra bisected Assam, in a tortuous path so as to delay its transit, as if to feed off the beauty of the land. In exchange, it bestowed fecundity and verdancy to the Assamese terrain.

Icherita was a small town in Upper Assam, some forty miles southeast of the better-known town of Dibrugarh. It was so small that you wouldn’t find it on a regular map. It was an island in a sea of tea estates; the town’s rail station was the focal point for the local tea industry’s commerce. From here, tea was freighted to Calcutta in those days, for auction, and then on to the rest of the world.

I lived with my father and my brother, Anil, in a tea plantation; my father and his father before him were tea planters. All my life I had been surrounded by a sea of green tea bushes with the acacia and albizia trees providing shade and scattering the sunlight to produce speckled shadows on the meandering paths in the plantation on which I walked. The greenness of these environs soothed the eye but not the turbulence within me. The dispersed light imparted clarity to the surroundings but failed to permeate the opaque melancholia of my mind or brighten the darkness of my world. The rain and wind came often in the plantations and in their wake, the mist lingered on and wafted into the enclosing vastness, enswathing it with a veneer of translucency.

My father owned and managed a tea plantation, which was a tiny one, compared to the mammoths that surrounded us. Anil, who was twenty-six years old at that time, was learning the ropes from our father. Soon, he would have to manage the tea estate, for our father wanted to retire to a life of spiritual endeavours.

We lived in a large, dilapidated bungalow, right in the heart of the tea plantation, in the midst of a forest of tea bushes and shade trees. Our bungalow looked haunted but wasn’t. It was merely in need of paint and repair.

Our tea plantation, Durga Tea Estates, was twenty miles northeastwards from the town of Icherita. We were a small tea estate, dwarfed by the surrounding estates that were really empires of tea. How we had survived till then in the vicinity of these prospering, enormous giants, I’m not certain. Even as a child, I knew that our tea garden managed to survive but only just; it subsisted in a precarious, impecunious state of existence. We were probably too small to matter in the scheme of things and hence had not been taken over by the big tea companies that surrounded us. My father might have happily sold the estate if any offers had come his way. Probably none did, and Durga Tea Estates struggled and continued to exist, and our gargantuan neighbours lived and let us be, let us live. At that time, we, my father, brother and I, were afloat in a decrepit vessel in the green sea of our moribund tea plantation; none of us seemed to be headed anywhere.

I was born in the Medical College Hospital in Dibrugarh, which was the biggest hospital in these parts, with an affiliated medical college where they schooled doctors. In this hospital, you had outstanding doctors, regional experts in their fields. My mother had a complication of some sort during my birth at the hospital in Icherita and had to be rushed by ambulance to Dibrugarh. But even the obstetric experts at that hospital, with the FRCOG title after their names, obtained from training sojourns in the United Kingdom, were not able to save her. She had a caesarean section, and I was born; I often wished that I were the one that the doctors had failed to save that night.

I was brought up by Philomena our housekeeper and my paternal grandmother, who I don’t remember much of; she passed away a few years back when I was seven. After that, I grew up on my own and was able to look after myself. Early on, in my childhood, I became quite self-sufficient; I didn’t have a choice.

Philomena had a family of her own and lived in the servants’ quarters in the back of our compound. She was a good soul and had taken care of us all, over the years; she would cook, clean, and wash and iron our clothes. She had a staff of two or three maids who helped her in her tasks and who she supervised; those maids came and went but Philomena had always been there as far as I could remember. She supported her family by taking care of us, while her mother looked after her two scrawny little sons. She had a good-for-nothing husband who occasionally worked as a labourer picking leaves in our tea estate but more often spent his time lazing around. They grew vegetables in a little garden in their backyard and seemed to manage quite well, and wore nice clothes, not hand-me-downs like other peoples’ servants. My father had realised her worth and was generous and paid her well. She seemed happy with her lot; she used to sing as she performed her chores, folk songs from her village that I didn’t quite understand.

How she came to be named Philomena was a mystery to me till my brother divulged that Christian missionaries had affected conversions en masse in her village, many years back when she was a child, and her name had hence been changed from Kuntibala. Her mother, a wizened old woman who spoke not a word of English and lived with her, had been renamed Cecelia, which seemed very incongruous.

Philomena had come to our tea plantation as a young girl of sixteen, hastily married off to one of our tea garden labourers due to the dire economic straits of her family that lived in the 24 Parganas, in the neighbouring state of West Bengal. Common relatives had arranged their marriage. Unlike her husband, who was born in the tea plantation and lived there all his life, Philomena was a relatively new entrant in the world of tea plantations; she had arrived about the time I was born. There was a brightness—a goodness—in her that made her noticed, and she was recruited to be part of the staff in our bungalow, delegated specifically with the task of looking after me, a motherless newborn.

Philomena was skinny and slight of stature, with shiny brown skin and wispy black hair that she tied in a little bun at the top of her head. She was honest and kind-hearted. She had a deep faith in Jishu Krishto—Jesus Christ, in her language. That, perhaps, kept her happy and cheerful, almost all the time. She was illiterate and had wanted me to teach her how to read and write once I had started going to school. I had been intermittently teaching her over the years and she had mastered the Assamese alphabet and numbers and could sign her name but couldn’t quite read yet. Sometimes in the evenings, after dinner was over and she had finished cleaning up, she would sit on her stool with her slate and chalk and I would teach her the Assamese language, in which I was no expert either. She also harboured ambitions of learning English, once she could read Assamese.

A stone’s throw from our bungalow lived Prem Deka and his wife Monisha, in a bungalow similar to ours, though less derelict. Deka Uncle, as I called him, was the manager of our tea estate. The Dekas lived in their own world and kept to themselves. Despite being our closest neighbours, we didn’t see them too often. I did know the story of Monisha, a sad story related to me by my brother Anil, which told me to be happy with my lot. There were people in this world, in our very own neighbourhood, living with bigger miseries, larger wounds. My troubles were small in comparison; it was just aloneness… But I must add, of a very severe degree.

Monisha Aunty, as I called her, was somewhat like me; she too was lonely, I could tell. She spent all her time indoors; she had the sickly pallor of sun deficiency. When I was younger, I would often walk over to their bungalow and visit her. We would sit on the verandah, and we would play chess that she had taught me. She would make her cook fry vegetable pakoras that she knew I liked and was one of the reasons I would visit. Sometimes, in between moving our chessmen, she would ask me about school or my father or brother, but mostly we would sit taciturn, in silence, a silence punctuated by an occasional remark that I would feel compelled to make. Our games usually ended in a stalemate as we both knew each other’s moves and propensities. After the game, I’d eat the pakoras; she wasn’t much of an eater, she ate to live. Deka Uncle was back home from work by 3 p.m., which would be my cue to leave. She’d ask me to come again, and I’d say politely that I would.

They never went to the Planters’ Club, which was the social epicentre of tea garden society in Icherita. So, the only time I saw Monisha Aunty was when I’d drop in to visit her. As I grew older, I began to find her silent companionship more and more oppressive and even the pakoras were not worth the gloominess of her company.

Two

Ijoined Holy Cross Auxilium School for Girls once I was six. Usually, children of the managerial classes in tea plantations were sent to boarding school; it had something to do with the lack of ‘good’ schools in these isolated areas. Even though schools were coming up, the practice of sending children to boarding schools for education remained; another tradition ingrained amongst the brown sahibs since the days of the British. My brother, along with a whole bunch of youngsters from the neighbouring tea gardens, had gone to boarding school in places ranging from Dalhousie to Darjeeling to Shillong to Mount Abu to New Delhi. I was one of the select few who went to a local school; probably, due to financial reasons (these boarding schools reportedly cost a fortune) rather than my father wanting me near him. And I’m glad I went to Holy Cross Auxilium: for that was where I met Miss Vikranta. Everything seems to happen for a reason.

Holy Cross Auxilium was a convent school for girls, in the town, run by the Sicilian Sisters of the House of the Holy Cross, a Catholic missionary organisation that had its origin in Italy. It was a fledgling school but was making remarkable progress because of the driving force of the headmistress, Sister Emily. She was a little crazy, rotund with a cherubic face, and wore a huge, wide-brimmed hat—like hunters wear on an African safari—above her nuns’ habit. She shielded her eyes behind dark glasses all the time, even indoors, even in the evenings; the tropical weather and the glare of the Indian sun were too much for her. She carried a little whip, for effect, that she would sometimes crack in the air to intimidate the students.

Everybody was a little afraid of her. Our paths had never crossed but I found her a little comical. Sometimes, when she would launch into her little act, scolding the girls, and cracking her whip in the air, while everybody cowered, I would have a hard time suppressing my smile. Thankfully, she had never caught me smiling.

I hated school. Given a choice, I’d never go to school. No one seemed keen to befriend my pig-tailed, lanky, grim-faced self. Being terribly shy, I tried to hide my shyness behind a façade of gruff aloofness. During recess, I had nobody to eat lunch with or walk around or play with or talk to. I stood in a corner of the playground, wishing I were elsewhere, wishing I were invisible, and watch the others. I couldn’t stand any of the girls in my class. They didn’t like me either. I sometimes felt that most of them didn’t even notice that I was there.

Classes were sheer torture. Most of the time, I would be daydreaming; I lived in a different world; I inhabited a parallel universe where no one could reach me. The teachers usually ignored me, along with the other backbenchers, and I ignored them. I would pay no attention to lessons; I wouldn’t study; I was one of the dunces in my class. My weekly test scores were poor and every week I’d have to listen to a stern lecture from the Class Teacher about how to improve my test performance, to be more attentive, more diligent etcetera... I rationalised that I fared poorly in the stupid weekly tests because I didn’t study. Surprisingly, I had never failed any final exam, which determined one’s promotion from one class to the next, and had never had to repeat a class. I’d always managed to pass, by the skin of my teeth.

The only subject that held some interest for me was Moral Science, taught by Sister Clara, the vice-headmistress. She loved to talk and would lecture us for the entire one-hour period every day about God and how to be good and kind, avoid temptation and perform one’s duty. No questions were asked, no homework was given and all that was expected of us during that period was to listen attentively and hopefully apply the directions to our life. There were no tests in Moral Science. One thing that I absorbed from these classes was that there was a God and praying to Him would alleviate all your sufferings. Though I had a nebulous idea about God, Sister Clara, during her sessions, had managed to convince me that He was Kind and would answer my prayers. So, I prayed unfailingly every day, for things to change—that my life would get better, that the weight of loneliness, which was slowly crushing me, would dissipate…

I sat at the back of the class, next to a bunch of class dunces like me. There was Fat Fatima and her ilk. They were dumb and fat or ugly. Though compelled to sit in their midst, I thought I was superior to them. I was not fat, and I was not ugly like some of them, I told myself. I was not stupid like them either, though my test scores indicated otherwise. I sat with them in class but strove not to talk to them and avoided them in the playground, preferring my own company to the company of such rabble.

I missed school on a regular basis for a long time with impunity. I skipped school on an average of one or two days a week for almost a whole year till my poor attendance was noticed at the end of the year and put me in trouble. I would not go to school and then have my father sign a leave of absence saying that I was unable to attend due to ‘urgent family matters’ or ‘sickness’. Being in a state of constant preoccupation, my father would sign them, probably without realising what those notes actually entailed. His signature was a squiggle that was easy to duplicate and yes, a few times, I forged it. Instead of going to school, I would wander in our garden or the tea estate. I spent those days in an imaginary world that was warmer, brighter, and more joyous than school.

The river Brahmaputra skirted the town of Icherita and looped around the northern head of the town for a few miles. A stretch on the northern part of Icherita, near the embankment, was situated about a foot lower than the river’s surface, which was why, a strong embankment made of stone blocks and concrete separated the town from the river and tried to prevent it from spilling into the town, from flooding the settlement during the rains. So far, the dike had been able to contain the waters during the monsoons. But every monsoon, when the Brahmaputra was in spate, the residents of Icherita surveyed the water level fearfully and kept their ears open for evacuation broadcasts from the local station of All India Radio. We all knew that it was bound to happen one of these days: the might of the river would break the stone edifice that contained it.

The riverside was about a mile from the town’s marketplace and there was an embankment there and a promenade where you could walk, alongside the river, enjoying a cool breeze that the river seemed to generate somehow, even on the hot, humid summer days. It was a popular place for the residents of the town, most of whom gathered there in the evenings for a stroll. Sometimes, on a Saturday evening, my father would take us, Anil and me, to the riverside, as part of his paternal duties. I would walk to the farthest end of the dike that was accessible and watch the river, mesmerised, till it was time to leave. I don’t know why, but I had a fascination for the swirling blue-black waters of the Brahmaputra—with its churning froth and its underlying wily currents—ever since I was little. I found that being near the river and watching its waves soothed me. I always looked forward to these visits to the riverside, which were rare and infrequent. Later, when I grew up and discovered my own river anew, I realised that it was a bond we had formed right from the beginning, the river and me.

I rediscovered the river and renewed my link to it once I learnt to drive. We had an old, rundown Fiat that stood in the garage, gathering dust and dripping diesel; a car that neither my father nor brother liked to use because of its unreliability but hadn’t had the time or inclination to get rid of. Mohan, one of our drivers,